Come off it! Most universities are in bad parts of town. However, being a college student usually keeps on secluded from the inside of life in these areas. Sure, most of us who got involved as students with community activism can attest to seeing these people, handing out a few sandwiches and saying tsk, tsk, as we marched back to cram for an exam. Yes, he may have used coke and it may have been written in his book but was he hanging out at crack houses? Did he have friends whose moms were crackwhores? Did he snatch a few bags while he was using it? You obamites all have the same defense when it comes to making excuses for your president.

Obama is an admitted Cocaine user, it is in his books! Add that he is the least published editor of the Harvard Law Review and it is clear that he is speaking as a user.

We may need to go back to all drugs being legal. The FDA is not going to certify drugs that prolong life if the Government is paying the freight so the only way we will get the cure for cancer is if Hollywood gets its recreational drugs at the same time.

The prohibition of other drugs causes us problems too and always will, but most of the other drugs are extremely harmful to users and innocent people and so few use these drugs anyway that it makes little sense to legalize them. We don’t want to legalize a drug like heroin, for instance, because only a tiny percentage of our population will even try that drug. In many parts of the country you probably wouldn’t be able to find it. Legalizing a drug like heroin would make it much more available and since so few use it now it wouldn’t take that many new users to double or triple or quadruple the number of heroin addicts we have causing all sorts of problems.

Most of the black market for illegal drugs is really just a black market for marijuana. If we legalized it we would eliminate most of the black market for illegal drugs and a corresponding amount of the problems it causes us. We’d still have problems from what remains of the black market but a much smaller black market with far less money driving it would be preferable to what we have now. It would be easier to contain. Drug trafficking organizations with many billions of dollars (the lion’s share of their income) less to work with every year would be smaller, less powerful, and easier to contain.

We should not legalize all drugs, but we should strongly consider legalizing marijuana and regulating it similar to alcohol. Marijuana prohibition does far more harm than good.

I taught high school on an American Indian reservation for three years. I can’t even catalogue for you all the death and misery I saw caused by “legal” alcohol. The problems didn’t exactly go away with the end of prohibition.

If you think that all of the social problems are caused by the fact that drugs are illegal, you are fools. The problems are caused by the drugs themselves.

Legalizing drugs will only end with lots of people becoming junkies, lots of traffic accidents and thousands of babies having their ba=rains damaged throug drug use by their mothers.

The only way is to target users. If you reduce the numbers users then prices go down and so the incentives for drug producers and dealers.”

How exactly do you target users? Put them in jail longer if you catch them? Then we are stuck with the same problem, no jail space to lock up people who are a much bigger threat. In my county it used to be that if someone was convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison on Wednesday, by Friday he would be transported to the prison. Now our prisons are so full there is a several month waiting list to get in. We are always have special early releases of prisoners too to try to deal with the problem but still the wait is several months. Our local jails are full too, so there is no room for knew convicts bound of prison. So guess what happens to them? Most all of the will get reporting bonds that allow them to stay out on the streets until a prison bed opens up. If these people are such a threat that we need to lock them up for our own safety, does it make sense to sentnce them to prison and then let them walk right back out on the streets until months later when a prison bed opens up?

Prison is really only good for keeping the bad guys away from the rest of us for a while. Prison is a limited resource. We cannot just lock up people up left and right because they might possibly be a threat, or because we are mad at them, or because they won’t play ball. We just don’t have enough room for that and cannot afford to continue building new prisons at the rate we built them throughout the eighties, nineties and even on into this decade.

A lot of people are under the impression that if you have tough laws you scare a lot of people to the point that they won’t commit a crime. There is some truth to that. Laws have deterrent effect. But the problem is that the level of deterrent effect a law will have is directly proportional to the level of risk of getting caught perceived by the person contemplating breaking a law. The harshness of the sentence isn’t everything. If someone thinks there is almost no risk of getting caught he’s far less worried about the remote possibility of a severe punishment. Well over half of all murders result in an arrest? What percentage of “pot smokings” do you think result in an arrest? I don’t know the exact answer to that, but it would have to be one in several thousand. It’s easy to get away with taking drugs if people will just be a little bit careful. Only a very small fraction of the people who use drugs will ever get caught. They know this too. They know that the likelihood of getting caught is slim, and this lack of deterrence is exacerbated by the fact that most people are young and feeling invincible when they start messing with drugs. We can increase the punishments for minor drug offenses, but it won’t really deter many more people. What it will do waste a lot more jail/prison space and result in more of this very unfair turn in life where most who use drugs never get caught and can go on even to be president but a few unlucky souls have their lives ruined for the same crime. I think that the people are sick enough of the war on drugs that they wouldn’t go for a major crackdown on drug users, and I don’t think it would do much good anyway.

One example on how to deal with it was set by the Mao regime in China in ridding that country of it’s opium addicts.

Draconian, but apparently effective.

My generation grew up with Coke and weed, junk wasn’t a big thing in Alberta. We pretty much all of us boys run off the to oil rigs, worked hard and had money to burn. I have seen friends go off the rails completely but for most of us it was used for nothing more than a party on days off. I have never once missed a day of work because I was drunk, hungover or blasted on anything because I knew my priorities and have held a job since age 15 @ $10/hr until this day @ 250K+/yr. As with anything else if used in moderation and you keep YOURSELF under control then there should be no reason a free man cannot put whatever he wants down his neck or in his lungs or up his nose. It all comes down to being responsible for your own life and actions.

That being said I wholeheartedly believe that if you can’t keep yourself under control then it will be done for you and jail time should be assigned if you commit crimes for any reason whether sober or not. prohibition achieved nothing and neither will this war on drugs unless you want to just shoot anyone who EVER uses them. For most people they would have to commence firing at the dining table as one gentleman said above.

Alcohol is probably the reason for more domestic violence and brawls than anything else. Thievery and murder over drugs is primarily due to astronomical profits involved and also to the massive sentences handed out due to the losing war on drugs but then if law abiding people didn’t have their own government trampling their God given rights to protect themselves the predations would be much less.

I say Do you want to wreck your life? Whatever blows your hair back. Just stay out of my house or you’re dead. Can’t steal and rob if they are dead.

If the law changes such that there isn’t the 100 to 1 sentencing disparity with crack and powdered cocaine, it’s not actually going to affect that many people. The overwhelming majority of people arrested on drug crimes are arrested by state or local law enforcement, not the feds, and they are prosecuted under state laws and go to state prisons. This change in the federal laws does not change the existing state laws. So this change is really only going to affect a small percentage of people, the few small time crack dealers who for some reason happen to get prosecuted by the feds instead of local law enforcement. And those small time crack dealers that get popped by the feds will still do prison time, just not quite as much in some cases. The only thing this is going to do is reduce the burden on our federal prisons a little bit. It’s not going to have any effect on the price of drugs or the availability of drugs. It shouldn’t result in any sort of “comeback” for crack because keeping these people locked up a few years longer has not in any way reduced the availability of crack or raised prices. A small percentage of the small time crack sellers who get caught will spend a little less time in prison. How will that cause a big comeback for crack? It’s not going to make a lick of difference.

Locking up drug dealers will only get the price raisng and increasing the incentive to produce and trade drugs.

Legalizing drugs will only end with lots of people becoming junkies, lots of traffic accidents and thousands of babies having their ba=rains damaged throug drug use by their mothers.

The only way is to target users. If you reduce the numbers users then prices go down and so the incentives for drug producers and dealers.

It is my understanding that the law treats 5 grams of crack the same as 500 grams of powdered cocaine. You would get the same mandatory minimum sentence for possession of 5 grams of crack as you would for possessing 500 grams of cocaine. A user who doesn’t sell could be in possession of 5 grams of crack. Usually someone with that much is selling it though. Usually it’s going to be a small time dealer. Someone with 500 grams of powdered cocaine is not a small time, unless maybe he’s just a drug mule being paid to transport drugs for someone else. A pound is only about 454 grams, so 500 grams is almost one pound and two ounces. That’s an awful lot. The 5 gram amount of crack that triggers the same sentence is less than a quarter ounce.

If someone has 500 grams of cocaine, it may very well be that he intends to cook all or part of it into crack. All it takes is water and a heat source and baking soda. A person could do it in a pan on his stove in a few minutes. Mix equal parts powdered cocaine and baking soda into a pan of hot water and stir, and pretty soon you get crack rocks. You can do it with a very small amount with a Pyrex test tube instead of a pan. The guy with a pound of cocaine is a much bigger dealer than someone with only five grams of crack, and if he’s in the inner city selling cocaine chances are he or someone else will cook most of that pound of cocaine into crack. He’s the guy supplying the crackhead with five grams of crack, but he wouldn’t be facing the mandatory minimum the small timer would face because a pound of powdered cocaine is less than the 500 grams it takes to trigger the mandatory minimum. So this law punishes small timers a lot more than the much bigger fish. That makes no sense.

Small time drug dealers are a dime a dozen. We can round a bunch of them up and throw them in prison and it has no effect whatsoever on the availability of drugs because there are always plenty of people left to supply the demand. Anyone who would have bought from these people we locked up will just buy from someone else. We aren’t even increasing the price that way because only very small amounts of drugs are being seized from these small timers. We’re wasting a fortune locking up small time drug dealers on long sentences, packing our prisons such that we have no room for people who are amuch bigger threat, and in doing this we aren’t making the drugs more expensive or hard to find. I realize that the thinking is that if we lock these people up we’ll reduce the drug problem, but that thinking is flawed because we are only taking minute amounts of drugs off the streets that way and although we are locking lots of people up there are always plenty more out there selling drugs so no one does without. It’s just not an effective use of resources to lock small timers up for a long time. We should be locking thieves up longer than dopers who sell a little dope to other dopers. At least we’d actually be stopping a lot of thefts from occurring. We aren’t stopping drug transactions from occurring by locking up small tim e drug dealers because those who would have bought from them will just buy from someone else.

I’m not for legalizing drugs like meth or cocaine or heroin. But we really do need to reconsider how we are dealing with the problem of these drugs. Some of the things we do now are not only not helpful, they are counterproductive.